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Two days ago we apparently had a drizzle in the wee hours of the morning, I woke up at 6am to a damp earth smell and wet trees, but missed the rain spell sighting, so I can’t really say I SAW the first rain just yet. The wind is blowing more steadily, clouds passages are more frequent, and people are starting to look a bit more lively during the day. I started walking again last week, even though I still wet a t-shirt in 5 minutes outdoor, and it seems I was not the only one to brave the park at 10am. A few people are venturing out again, a sure sign that something is changing in the air. Ishita had her last day of Summer camp yesterday, so I moved my walk at 7am this morning with DH spending time with her while I did so. But with Ishita not being in school came the dilemma of keeping her busy long enough in the morning, so by the time I was back from my walk, DH’s tiffin was packed and I got my well deserved shower I had to come with a plan. So by 10.30 we were back out to the park. Sadly there was no one there, which is not surprising really, adults may start venturing out again, but kiddos are usually tucked away in front of TV at this time. Not that the park in question was even critically too hot then, there was still plenty of shade and a lovely breeze to keep us fresh. Ishita could not really comprehend why the park she loves to go to in the evening to meet with her friends was so deserted, so in the end she settled for lying down across my lap on one of the big garden swings, and we lazed around in the the shade while the breeze kept us cool. And there I was thinking that we once again reached that point where we are about to fall in the Monsoon season. And for the second year in a row we did spend the whole Summer in Mumbai, and we survived it. I managed to keep Ishita busy enough, and to not completely loose my sanity. We kept the TV to a minimum too, which I am happy to have achieved as well. When I picked her up in school yesterday I realised it was the last time I would walk her down to our old apartment complex, as in two weeks she starts Jr Kg in a new school.

As far as the climate is concerned, i am not sure which one of these two Summer was hotter. Last year our old flat was East facing with huge bay windows which pretty much turned the flat in an oven before noon, with no breeze coming in since it was facing no other direction. That said i don’t remember soaking clothes the way I did this year, but then again I didn’t have to go out in the sun at noon the way I had to this year. Our current flat is essentially North facing, with the Sun coming at an angle on our balcony in the morning, and our bedrooms facing North/West which allows some of the evening breeze to flush the stuffy air out, but we still needed the AC at nap time, and are still waiting for the days we can do without at night again. Like last year this Summer has managed to numb me completely and all I can now hope is that this year’s Monsoon will strike on time and offer a bit more rain and relief than it did last year.

For now my eyes are still glued to the sky, waiting for signs of that elusive first rainin which I really need my eyes to soak drop by drop in order to really believe that Summer is truly over.

Last year I was writing about how I never really cared as much about mangoes as I do about peaches, and they are back now, but that is not the only fruit I am looking forward to at this time of the year, the other one is this one :

When I posted the picture on my personal FB page a couple of my US based friends were wondering what they were, so I’ll say it here as well. These are lychees, fresh ones, and I don’t blame anybody not living in a part of the world where they are cultivated because it is rare to get them fresh in these areas. Most of my friends knew them as peeled and canned, the way I did growing up in Switzerland, where I have in all my life seen them in their rind only once. In India I had no idea they were even cultivated until 2006 because no local fruit vendors would have them for sale in Bangalore before that. In the past few years they have been a very common sight in supermarkets in Bangalore, and are on every fruit vendors stalls in my neighbourhood in Mumbai. To me their rosy plump shell and green leaves just come to soothe my eyes and spirit after nearly 2 months of climbing heat and humidity, promising fresher days. They come in season May end until June end and then they pretty much disappear from the stalls until the next Summer. Their appearance come just before the monsoon, giving people something sweet and fresh to eat and keep them patient until the first downpour. The fresh fruit has all the sweetness of the canned one I knew of back home, but has something extra to the taste that canning kills: a floral almost woodsy note, and an incomparable juiciness. Ishita and I are both big lychee fans and a bunch bought from the local vendor is usually gone in a day, or two at the most.

Their arrival this year is as usually coming like a beacon of hope to me, the heat and humidity this year has been unbearable, and I just can’t wait for a good heavy rain to cool us all down. The clouds have been teasing us passing over our head, accuweather has been mean forecasting thunderstorm that never graced us this week. Needless to say that my blog hasn’t been on top of my priority list recently, beside you can’t peel and eat lychees and type at the same time, that would make the laptop seriously sticky.

Most Indian kitchens are equipped with a counter top stove that in Switzerland would be known as a camping stove and looks like this :

This has been our stove since 2004, the good old 2 burner stove, found in still many a household…but this one is no longer. After quite a few weeks…ahem months of debate we got rid of it. Simply because it was starting to really be unsafe. In the past year alone we had to have a repair guy come over twice to fix some valve issue because it was smelling of raw gas while cooking, the last fix came last December a few days after we moved into our new place, after that fix the dimmer feature on the big burner was pretty much kaput, it was or full flame or no flame at all. In August 2011 when we shifted back to Mumbai and connected the stove to piped gas (picture above was taken then) the stove refused to work altogether, so that was yet another servicing we had to do in the not so distant past. two weeks ago DH started smelling gas while the burner was on again, and my maid confirmed she smelled the same on occasion in the past few months, I told DH that after his experience I kept smelling the gas smell every time I switched the thing on, so DH decided we should order a new one from snapdeal…that was one of the e-shopping snafu I was mentioning earlier, the stove never came and the order thankfully got cancelled and refunded, but not without screaming from my part. The gas smell came and went during these 10 days of waiting so we just hoped for the best and planned to shop sometimes on the weekend. This last Sunday however I suddenly heard DH saying “Honey just come over here” which had me come to the kitchen only to be assaulted by a strong odour of gas, despite the stove being off! GASP, I went switching the regulator off immediately, opened all the windows wide, and after a few minutes with caution switching on the exhaust fan to get it out, the urgent need to get a stove asap was upon us, and DH noticed the smell only before heading out to go watch a play, so we had to go at around 8pm the the nearby mall at the default of anything else to get this :

This is a better looking version of the classic 2 burner stove, which are by the way becoming a rarity, as it seems that between 2004 and now the new thing is to get 4 burner stoves. We could have gone and hunted an old stainless steel body stove, but from our earlier browsing online that resulted from a snap deal headache we preferred going for a glass top stove with far less folds, nook and crannies to clean, because if there was one thing we hated about our old stove was how though it was to keep it super clean, some folds have been accumulating grease that never really cleaned over the years, not even with a tooth brush and a sold dose of elbow grease, so we figured out that with a smooth glossy finish we might be able to spot the dirt and eliminate it faster. But I guess only time will tell if we were right. One thing is sure though, be it steel or glass, two burner stoves are disappearing fast, most brands such as glen, prestige and sunflame are keeping far less models in their range, moving to a wider range of built in hobs and 4 burner counter top stoves instead. The problem is that not even in Switzerland where electric 4 plate stoves are the norm did I ever use more than two at the same time, and in nearly 10 years in India I never ever felt the need to have more than two either, now even less than ever with appliances such as a rice cooker to free one spot. And from my friends that got into the 4 burner mode I learned that they rarely use the two front burners because it gets too close from their body for comfort and doesn’t even feel safe (kitchen counters are lower in India to begin with). My maid’s first reaction to the stove was that the glass top gets hot and that it is weird. I’m not sure what the reasoning is behind the glass top, my guess is that it keeps heat and saves energy, but I’m not sure she would get that, so I just told her to remember not to touch the stove and never put any heavy pan and utensils on the glass part. So far it seems it is actually boiling water faster, and I chalk that to more efficient non leaking burners more than anything else, and here is to a stove that hopefully will last us another 9 years.

Water seepage! If there is one constant I had to deal with in every flats I lived in since moving to India, that would be this one. Simply put you can’t avoid it, you can move to a nice modern higher end building and you will still end up or having to deal with a fresh leak or see traces left by old ones behind. Old or new the building WILL leak, some more badly or frequently than other, but this is the one thing you can’t really escape, which is rather funny because for a country where rain only comes during one specific season, constructions seem far more affected than the ones in Switzerland were rain is an all year occurrence thing, and while in Switzerland it’s older buildings that tend to suffer from that ill, it’s the exact opposite in India, the older the building I lived in was the less leaks I had to deal with, move into a fancy less than 5 years old apartment building and you are sure to be dealing with big ones. The reason being that developers in their quest to make a quick buck are just about ready to cut cost and everything down to the quality of the materials used to build the whole thing.

The current building in which we are staying is 10 years old, so not super old, but still built at a time were developers had humans in mind when they built apartment buildings, which is why our place is significantly bigger than what is being build now. The problem is that 10 years of age is enough for a building to start showing signs of ageing. And normally that is when the society cooperative should kick in and maintain the property, which has been done to some fair extent recently with the management commissioning a big external walls fixing and repainting. Our building looks all new and spiffy with it’s new colours on, the problem is that the plumbing inside the walls is still the original and pretty much left alone. When we visited the flat last December, one of the bedroom had signs of an old long ago dried out leak, so did the utility area, but as I said these are just so common in house in India that we didn’t let it stop us from liking the place (it was the nicest of all the places we visited anyway). Fast forward to 3 weeks ago when I posted this on a wall in my living room :

The picture is not really doing it justice, sorry about that. But that leak is on a tiny narrow wall by the side of the balcony door. My first thought was that the AC pipes were leaking, but we haven’t even used that AC once, and the leak appears only on that side of the wall and not the other, the other puzzling factor is that this is a wall where no water pipes are encased in, yet the wall is massively damp to the touch suggesting a steady flow of water seeping in, and until recently it was gaining abut an inch a day. For days we asked neighbours if they changed plumbing in their homes or noticed the seepage in their flat, we are on the 3rd floor and nobody above have noticed a leak in their own flats in the same place, however they all reported crazy leaks in the past few weeks in their bathrooms or some bedrooms, so turns out we aren’t the only one plagued by leaks we can’t even figure out the source of. We approached the society manager with the problem, he whined that he was fed up hearing the same type of complaints from everybody in the building and refused to investigate. So pissed off I did try to trace the leak, more or less unsuccessfully I must admit, my only leads were a few sudden big bulging blisters in the external wall paint job completed a few months ago. So much so that it could be totally possible that a draining pipe is faulty somewhere and the water has been leaking in a crack where nobody can see it for months, and thanks to the waterproof paint the water stayed trapped inside the wall forced to find it’s way through every possible creases and crack and seeped out where it could, anywhere it could. Acrylic paint suddenly blistering away from the wall it was supposed to adhere to only means one thing: water got in. So if water piled up there and could not escape that meant it had to slowly build up and escape somewhere else: my living room wall. So I took a nice pointy knife and cut all the blisters I could reach on the external wall, immediately getting heaps of water out. The instant result? The leak inside my wall stopped growing an inch a day, on day 3 it started slowly drying out at the bottom, and I now have hopes that most of it will be gone within a few weeks since the burst blisters also just stopped dripping 2 days ago. meanwhile my landlord got informed of the leak and sent the pictures I took of the extent of the leak, and announced to us at the start of the week that he complained to the society cooperative, whether his voice was louder than the others or not I have no idea, right now I am still keeping an eye on that seepage which hasn’t started to grow mold, thankfully, but is starting to look like a “Grow your own crystals” experiment. Less damp is definitely an improvement in my book, even if the process from less damp to completely dry could take weeks. No one has offered to have a look at the problem or taken care to speed up the drying out process, making me far from feeling guilty from peeling away acrylic paint blisters off a newly repainted wall. If the society management wants to ignore resident’s reports and complaints then they should not even think of coming to complain about what residents are forced to do to protect their belongings and their health. This has been the one thing that has been keeping me somewhat alert during this heat…now if you excuse me, back to just lying down and waiting for the monsoon to strike (hopefully leaving my wall alone)

Right now my brain is pretty much mush, and it’s a combo of Summer heat, PMS and e-shopping woes that is pretty much numbing me away. I will not go into the detail on the e-shopping just now, it’s still raw and at this point I am wondering if just writing about it is not going to break into hives, or possibly self combust….that’s how crazy it is.

So instead I will go and blog about a craft project Ishita and I got into what could have as well been a century ago, but was done in April if I remember well. Back then she suddenly got obsessed with Tinker bell's fairy house in the Great Rescue Movie, so much so that I thought it would be a cute idea to make one from an old box of Surf Exel laundry detergent. Here is how it looked:

Ishita helped me paste some yellow paper all around the box, and cut out some leaf shape with a leaf cut-out puncher, I shaped the roof and she helped me past the leaves to it. I made the door out of drinking straws.

One of the fancy paper sheet we used to cut leaves out was the right size to be turned into a floor pattern inside the house and I used an old gift wrap bit to past on the wall to look like a framed picture, Ishita decided her toy elephant would love staying in the house too.

I had some cut-out butterflies left in my stash of supplies so we used them to decorate the windows of the house as well.

The house is now sadly starting to fall apart a little, Ishita played with it a lot, but it was a fun project. Right now we have even put crafting on hold as it is simply too hot to do anything during the day but sleep and the instant it gets bearable again around 6pm we are out to the playground. We are eagerly waiting for the rain to come, looking at the sky daily, and these days more clouds are passing, but that’s all they do, pass and continue their travel without gracing us with cooler days. On this word I will leave you today because here I am at 11am struggling to get two words together to make a sentence that actually would make sense, a sure sign I need to lie down and rest.

This is one of these dishes that made itself a steady and comfy place in my cooking repertoire, and rather recently too. In October 2012 the issue of GoodFood India had a spread on Pakistani cuisine with a few recipe in it and DH immediately said “Try it Pakistani food is awesome”. While the spread in question had more complicated meat dishes and deserts, there was one dish that stood out there: Baingan Borani. A vegetarian dish made of mashed eggplant and a cousin of the Baigan bharta cooked in some regions in India. The Pakistani version of the mashed eggplant dish has however no tomatoes in it, and a fare more muted spice palette. The original recipe asked for green chillies in the dish but since DH doesn’t like them and I am not much of a fan myself I substituted them with Kashmiri paprika powder, when the dish is cooked to my place it looks like this :

Compared to the magazine’s picture my version has more walnuts and more coriander leaves on top, what can I say, we love these in our family. The reason this dish suddenly found itself as a steady favourite is that awesome yum factor set aside, it is one of these dishes that is simple to pull, not quick, but despite it’s long cooking time will not keep you in the kitchen the whole time. It’s one of these dishes that will look good enough to serve when you have guests over without trapping you in the kitchen away from your other hostess duties either, in fact I made it recently for my circle of friends, all i had to do was prepare the eggplant puree in advance and assemble the dish in 5 minutes when we all decided to sit down and eat. It tastes absolutely fantastic with either chapatti, paratha or naans. DH and I usually eat it as a stand alone dish because we can’t get enough of its taste, but it would make a wonderful side dish to a grilled meat dish too. So without any further rambling from my part, here is how I make it at home :

1) Preheat your oven to 200 degrees celsius, with a fork prick your eggplants all over and shove into the oven on a tray lined with tin foil. Bake for about one hour and 20 minutes (yes that long). if you do not have an oven, it is possible to roast the eggplants directly on the flame of your gas stove, but I have not tried it. For me this is the dish that I can leave in the oven to cook while doing something else around the house.

2) Once the eggplants are cooked take them out of the oven and let them cool a little while, enough that you can handle them, they will look wilted, and all deflated, that’s normal, there should be a faint smell of roast too. Once they are cool enough for you to handle, slice them open length wise and scoop out all the cooked flesh out and discard the peels.

3) In a big flat bottomed and deep rimmed frying pan heat about 2-3 table spoons of vegetable oil and add the diced onion to it, stir and cook until the onions start to look golden, then add the cumin seeds and continue cooking for about a minute. Add the eggplant, salt, paprika and turmeric and mix well. cook for 5 minutes until the excess liquid has been absorbed.

4) Transfer the eggplant puree to a serving dish and pour your plain yogurt on top, for the presentation do not cover the whole dish with the yogurt, leave the puree peaking on the sides.

5) in a small stainless steel bowl, or better yet if you have one, a “tadka pan” heat 1-2 tbsp oil in it and first toss the dry red chilli, followed immediately by the mustard seeds, when the seeds start crackling add the chopped garlic and remove from the flame the minute the garlic starts turning golden, of the flame add the pinch of turmeric powder and twirl gently to combine before pouring the seasoned oil all over the yogurt.

6) Sprinkle the dish with coriander leaves and walnuts and serve immediately with your choice of bread.

This morning I stumbled upon a link a friend shared on Facebook, which is about the project a photographer did, taking pictures of what a week of groceries look like in families around the world, you can view the pictures there.

I found it very interesting on many levels though I don’t think this would be considered an accurate representation of food habits of an entire nation. Because from country to country it seems that the family in the pictures do not all belong to the same socio-economic class, you can’t really accurately compare the diet of middle class American with the one of what seem to be the one of a rural and possibly nomadic family in Chad. And I know many Americans that do not eat as much take out and junk food as the family portrayed in that article. That said if you look a bit closer at all the pictures you start noticing certain things that vary greatly from one region to another. One thing that stroke me the most was the amount of packaged non water drink amount. Many families from European countries and a few from the American continent seem to have more juice and soda bottles as part of their weekly groceries as most families in Asia and the Middle East, and you can’t necessarily chalk that to the income of these families as the Indian family portrayed is middle class, the Japanese one also seem to be middle class and urban, the Kuwait family also seem to be well off and yet all I see in their groceries are individual serve water bottles. I also find it interesting that the French have a lot of packaged drinking water compared to other European families, I know that many regions in France don’t necessarily get tap water that taste good, and a few decades ago I even went into some area where they actually told you to avoid tap water as it was not necessarily fit for consumption, and I have no idea how things improved, as you can imagine I haven’t been there in years. Another thing I find very interesting is that the amount of fresh produce on the grocery list in these family is proportionate to the climate, Most of Europe has only a short season for fresh vegetables and fruits, with long Winters during which almost nothing will grow and it reflects in the eating habits of the families where you find more packaged food, cereals and meat. Countries were the climate is more temperate around the year have far more fresh produce entering a family’s diet as it is the case with the Mexican, Indian, Turkish and Guatemalan families. Both African representative families in the experiment seem to come from areas that are dryer and grain seems to be more of a staple for them, but again, I have a feeling that at least the family from Chad is belongs to a lower socio-economic class than the other families.

My typical Swiss family seem to have habits extremely similar from the French family pictured in that project, a fairly balanced diet of meat, starch, fresh fruits and veggies but probably more dairies as it is far more of a staple in Alpine areas in Europe. We used to have bottles sparkling water (called soda in India) and later a soda making machine to make tap water sparkling. It is something that amused DH when he visited there as he noticed that the Swiss will rarely drink plain water with their meal and almost exclusively was is called Soda in India, he even found it funny that we categorize the soda water as “strong” or “regular” depending of the amount of bubbles you will find in it. It’s not that we don’t drink plain water, we drink plenty of it, from the tap or packaged mineral water, but NOT at meal time. I think the logic is that the water intake should be less while you eat, and adding bubbles to it makes you less likely to down your water like a tanker, the fizz also seem to clean the palate better between courses.

Now since I live in India and have been doing so for nearly 10 years now, I can tell you that the picture of the Indian family’s groceries look quite accurate, the only thing that puzzles me is that they don’t seem to show the packs of dry lentils and other dry goods that are a significant enough staple in the desi diet. Instead they seem to show a lot of cooked dishes, and that has me scratching my head a little. From there I decided to see where our household of 3 members stood. I don’t have a picture to share because I did my weekly shopping on Saturday and as you can imagine all my groceries are already stored away but here is what a typical week of grocery supplies would look for us :

These above are regular enough in our diet, then of course there are ALL the things we need to buy on occasion but never really often enough to put a set frequency of use on them: Spices, herbs, chocolate, speciality meat items, certain namkeens… Another thing worth mentioning about our household, is that we are in the higher salary bracket, so things like walnuts and almonds are things we don’t have problem buying more often and include as a staple in our diet. And i am sure some of you might wonder about the milk being totally absent from our weekly groceries, well that’s because DH is the only one drinking some in his tea and an occasional glass of complan here and there, and we get it on a need of the day basis from the milk man, usually never more than 2 litres a week sometimes less. For the Swiss that I am, the only major difference from our current diet here in India and what I grew up on is the amount of dairies, bread is also pretty much absent in my diet in India, in Switzerland sourdough bread is a daily staple in our diet.

Wraps, Frankie, khati roll…some of the many names given to what is essentially a chapatti or roti rolled and stuffed with your choice of filling and are the desi equivalent to the Mexican burrito. A versatile dish that is a tiffin favourite with kids, a street food delight and a fantastic lazy day meal option.

Yesterday was one of these supremely lazy days, and if I haven’t made it clear already, the heat is such that cooking is daunting. So much so that when Ishita begged for some chapatti as soon as she was out of school, I stopped to by some ready made one from the brand I.D. Brand I might add is really starting to place itself as a modern Indian housewife lifesaver with their range of pre-cooked paratha, chapatti and dosa batter. We had some of the chapatti for lunch and there was still plenty left in the pack (35 rupees for 10 chapatti), so I took a pack of chicken breast out of the freezer to thaw and by dinner time I made some rolls, in minutes! To make them quick like I did you will need these essentials:

You are looking at regular mayonnaise, Imli sauce (the sweet and sour one served on chaats), and readymade precooked chapatti. Now of course if it was less critically hot and unbearable in the kitchen I would have made the chapatti from scratch myself, especially since I really don’t like how my maid does them. But we are talking about a fussy tired toddler and a tired mama at the end of a long hot and humid Summer day here. What you will need that is not in this picture are 3 small chicken breast (makes 5 wraps), and some fresh coriander leaves. I have a sandwich maker with grill plates, so I heated it to high temperature, and put the three breasts in it to grill until done (took about 7-8 minutes). If you don’t have a grill, just put a little oil in a flat bottomed frying pan or tawa and grill the breasts there until done to the middle. Once your chicken is cooked immediately chop it in small cubes and put them in a mixing bowl, add about 2-3 table spoon of mayo, season with paprika and black pepper and mix well. Then heat the chapatti tawa on the stove and reheat the precooked chapatti one by one (it takes seconds). Place one chapatti on the plate, add the chicken, drizzle with the Imli sauce, sprinkle a little coriander on top and fold the bottom of the chapatti before rolling it. Voila, you have a quick wrap in minutes and almost no sweat. Ishita ate half of one and gave the other one to the dog before I could intervene, both kiddo and canine enjoyed it. DH first said he wanted only one because he didn’t feel hungry enough, but after one bite of his asked me to please go make a second one because the taste was awesome. And I got my two rolls myself feeling satiated and happy to have made everybody happy in my household in just about 10-15 minutes of preparation. I forgot to take pictures of the rolls in question, we were far too busy sinking our teeth in them as you can imagine.

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